That form of spamming hundreds of websites by minor modifications of messages optimized for an average reader obviously wouldn’t survive on LW. And optimizing messages specifically for LW wouldn’t be cost-effective. The operation needs to scale well; there is a whole internet to take over, and even Kremlin’s propaganda budget has its limits.
But I could imagine a multi-tiered approach. Something like categorizing the websites into a few groups, and crafting messages for each of these groups separately. The categorization itself could actually be quite simple: for each category, you choose a few “prototypical” websites, and then let a neural network assign the right category for everything else. Then you do the same thing—have a smart guy writing a message optimized to impact people in given category, and a stupid guy to spam all websites assigned into given category with small modifications of the message—for each category separately.
With enough categories, I could imagine that one of them could be compatible enough with LW. Probably “rationalists” is too narrow, but something like “educated people” or maybe even “STEM” could get among the first dozen categories.
Here are a couple of useful links—from the New York Times and the Guardian.
Information wars are quite real. How much actual impact do they have is a different question.
A fun possibility to consider: do we have Russian mole here on LW? X-D
That form of spamming hundreds of websites by minor modifications of messages optimized for an average reader obviously wouldn’t survive on LW. And optimizing messages specifically for LW wouldn’t be cost-effective. The operation needs to scale well; there is a whole internet to take over, and even Kremlin’s propaganda budget has its limits.
But I could imagine a multi-tiered approach. Something like categorizing the websites into a few groups, and crafting messages for each of these groups separately. The categorization itself could actually be quite simple: for each category, you choose a few “prototypical” websites, and then let a neural network assign the right category for everything else. Then you do the same thing—have a smart guy writing a message optimized to impact people in given category, and a stupid guy to spam all websites assigned into given category with small modifications of the message—for each category separately.
With enough categories, I could imagine that one of them could be compatible enough with LW. Probably “rationalists” is too narrow, but something like “educated people” or maybe even “STEM” could get among the first dozen categories.